I was thinking about the power offered by ARM Cortex M4 devices running at 180MHz clock rates and how it might be possible to integrate webcam streaming over ethernet with these devices.
A little more lateral thinking led to the idea of doing small amounts of image processing to monitor e.g. extruder gear movement and filament exit from the nozzle for the purposes of hot-end jam and spaghetti detection.
One you put a camera into a system, and support it with adequate processing power, the possibilities seem endless.